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1. Responsibility is not a word that can be limited to man. It must belong to those higher orders of created intelligence known to us as angels of various degrees. It must belong to the Eternal One Himself. It must be that He holds Himself responsible for the creation and its consequences. If responsibility belongs to the creature made in the image of God, it is inherited responsibility; it comes down from Him who made him.

2. Let us approach the subject cautiously. God's revelation of Himself is intended to be a light to the mind and a joy to the heart. Everyone who knows anything of Scripture knows how gradual has been the revelation of God to the human race. Not till we reach the time of David do we get the word father as applied to Deity, and then only in a figurative sort of way. Isaiah prophesies that one of the signs of the Christian dispensation shall be that the name of God as revealed in Christ shall be "the Everlasting Father." Men had known Deity as the Self-Existent God — the source of life. They had thought of Him as the God of providence, the Great Provider, who had them in His hands, and would care for them, and that is about the utmost practical view attained to in the Old Testament. In that wonderful book of Job, the epitomised life of the human race, we have the thought of an unrealised Redeemer, — but "My Father and your Father, My God and your God" is new Testament language, and post-resurrection speech at that.

3. This speech leads us to the thought of the Divine responsibility. It is not our invention but God's revelation that, like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. We have a right, then, to say that at least the same measure of responsibility which belongs to a father for the nourishment, education, and development of his child belongs to the great Eternal Father for us all. We are not responsible for the laws which work in our own constitutions, for we did not create those laws. We are not responsible for anything which is out of our own power. I am not responsible for the original tendency to sinfulness which was in my nature when born into this world. Nor am I responsible for being born; nor for being born where I was born; nor for having just those parents which were mine; nor for being just so high and just so heavy; nor for having the temperament and disposition with which I was born.

4. I suppose that in the generations behind us there have lived people who verily persuaded themselves that they were responsible for the sin of Adam, that they were doomed because an ancestor of generations ago was a wilful sinner. Every man inherits tendencies from past generations. When the first of men wilfully disobeyed God, he started in himself a tendency which, if not resisted, would become a habit of wrong-doing — and that habit would be propagated into the next generation, and into the next, and so on. And that is what is meant by original sin — the tendency created by generations past to wrong — stamping its impress upon mind and heart, yea, upon the physical organism. It is so in the animal world. In the past, dogs have been trained to fold sheep, and the instruction has become a habit, and the habit has created a tendency in the next generation to do the same thing, and has become fixed — a second nature, as we say. And this law runs through all creation, even into the vegetable world. Now, He who made man is responsible for the original law by which tendencies to good and evil can be propagated from sire to son. The law is not evil; it is good. But good laws are often used for bad purposes. From a reservoir of pure water pipes are laid to every house in the city. Those pipes were laid for the conveyance of pure, wholesome water for the benefit of a large population. That was the original design and intention. But suppose that city should be besieged by a barbarian army — suppose the army should surround the reservoir and poison the waters, the very pipes which were laid for the conveyance of life would be conduits for the conveyance of death. But that was not their original design. And so our guilt does not extend to Deity. He is responsible for the beneficent law, not for the sin which has been transmitted along it. The very idea of intelligence involves freedom. Either there must be freedom, or there can be no intelligence and no morality.

5. We cannot conceive of an omniscient God, without admitting that He must have foreseen that the creature He made would abuse His liberty. Does the Divine responsibility extend to making such provision as would prevent it? Clearly not. We cannot conceive how it could be made, and yet leave man a free moral agent, not a machine. The Divine responsibility extends to the providing a means whereby not simply to develop an innocent man, but to save a guilty man from the spiritual consequences of his sin. From all the consequences he cannot be saved; from the fatal consequences he can. That God did anticipate the fall from innocence of His creature, and provide for meeting man in a fallen condition, is evident from one single expression, "the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world." Redemption was no afterthought. For our own convenience, it may be necessary at times to speak of justice, and at other times of mercy. But justice and mercy in God are never represented as in antagonism. They ever go hand-in-hand, like light and heat in the sunbeams. When God opened the eyes of the great apostle he saw this truth, that "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound," or, as it is more correctly, "superabounded," abounded over and above. In this dispensation of things a lost man has not simply to reject God as a Creator, but God as a Redeemer — God in Christ — the God who has done all and everything possible to be done to nullify the fatal results of sin.

6. You remember the complimentary word uttered respecting Abraham: "I know him that he will command his children"; and in every father there is lodged the right to command — the duty to command. That weak tenderness which permits disobedience to go unrebuked and unpunished, is not Divine tenderness. It is the frailty of human irresoluteness. There is nothing of that in God.

(R. Thomas, D. D.)

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KJV: But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.

WEB: But now thus says Yahweh who created you, Jacob, and he who formed you, Israel: "Don't be afraid, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name. You are mine.